Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-30

Four panels show Jiggs alone at a telephone, struggling to get through a call. Each panel tightens on his mounting frustration — "Why-er —" / "Uh?" / "Um —" — until Maggie storms in demanding to know why he cannot reach his number. His reply: "Keep quiet. I'm talkin to my wife." The gag turns on the oldest of reversals: the man dodging his wife is actually *calling* her. McManus draws with confident Art Nouveau curves, plaid crosshatching, and rubber-limbed physicality that made *Bringing Up Father* — launched in 1913 — one of the most widely syndicated strips in the world. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct template for the first comic books, which were simply collected reprints of such pages until original material appeared in the mid-1930s.